How can I improve these splashes?

[SUPERGENIUS]

Hello, I know I'm posting a lot of questions but there aren't very many resources for learning this software currently. I am not trying to dominate the forums but hey.. what can ya do?

I have a movie here that isn't going too well, but I know it's possible. Specifically, I am having trouble with splashes. The trouble is the following: (motion blur is off right now for speed reasons)

https://vimeo.com/63866601

1) They are very... planar. It's obvious when viewing them. Is there a way to orient the planarity? Or is the planarity a misconfig by me?
2) They seem to bounce too far or spread too much. (air friction is at 1.)
3) My water seems to be the wrong scale. But the objects in the scene are to scale.

I also included the scene here.

Thanks so much!
AJ @ Supergenius Studio

[Ivaylo Katev]

the first thing that rushes in my eyes is the discontinuousness of the water simulation and the particles. i mean, the water breaks on droplets even without the particles. you have to set the size of the particle droplets to be similar to to the water ones, so for the observer should be hard to determine which droplet is a particle and which one is a liquid. of course not all the particles must be big sized, the most of them have to be smaller than the liquid droplets. but you have to have big ones too. this is achievable playing with the size variation and size distribution parameters. set in the size parameter the size of the smallest particles, set in the variation the ratio between their size and the liquid droplet size. this will produce mixture of droplets that contain big number of small particles and low number of big particles with continuous distribution. now you have to determine the ratio between the bigger and smaller particle count. if you set it to 1, your distribution will be uniform, i.e. the bigger and the smaller droplets will be equal by count. however, the smaller particles will be almost invisible placed beside the big ones. so, you have to set a bigger distribution ratio, to ensure bigger count of the smaller particles. i prefer to start the adjustment using a number between 100 and 1000, depending on the scale.

[SUPERGENIUS]

Thank you very much, you have been very helpful and patient with me. I appreciate your time.